Online song contest
For a list of online song contests, see List of song contests. An online song contest is a song contest hosted on the internet. These contests are often based on the Eurovision Song Contest, a real song contest which is held every year. This Wiki, the Song Contest Wiki, is used as a database for these type of contests, mainly for those hosted on Youtube. The people who are hosting the contests and the people who are participating in them are using the Song Contest Forums as their gathering spot. Structure Since most of the song contests are based on the Eurovision Song Contest, the main things about them are that countries are competing against other countries and that the ESC voting system is used. To be able to use this voting system, each contest contains a minimum of 11 entries. If there are lots of entries, contests can consist of semi-finals too and not just one final. The most common number of semi-finals used in contests are two but there are also a couple which uses one or three. Before each edition of a contest, other users submits their entries to the host of the contest. The most common is to send a country, an artist and a song through a private message on Youtube. In most contests the artist should have some type of connection to the country to be eligible to represent it in the contest. The host then creates a recap video and uploads it to Youtube. The video plays each countries entry after each other and are often designed to show an image of the countries flag, an image of the artist and a text displaying the name of the artist, song and country while the song is playing. Some contests are also using video material in their recap, showing the music video of the song instead. The participants watch the recap video and vote for their favourite songs. They give 12, 10 and 8 to 1 points to ten of the songs and can not vote for their own entry. Participants with an entry in the contest are often required to vote to avoid being penalised or disqualified. Votes are written down as a list with the name of the country next to the amount of points the voter wants to give to the song. The votes are mostly either posted in the comment section of the recap video or sent by private message to the contest host. After the host decides to close voting, the host will count the results to see which country got the most points. The winner is then announced, often in a new video showing the results. Submissions to the next edition of a contest are often open while voting in the current edition is going on. Origin Early years Song contests made by other people on the internet, which are based on the Eurovision Song Contest, is likely to have been around for quite some time. These contests have been hosted on Youtube, Facebook, FreeWebs, MSN Groups and ESC related forums. Modern era The modern era started in the summer of 2011 when the number of song contests hosted on Youtube exploaded. The contest which is considered to be the very first one within the community is the World Music Contest (WMC) hosted by superXxxmausixxx, however the contest which likely inspired so many people to start their own contest was the second one, Ourvision Song Contest (OVSC) hosted by OurVisionSongContest. OVSC took online song contests to a completely new level when it was the first contest to introduce many of the features which many other contests are using today. OVSC also created both the Song Contest Wiki and the Song Contest Forums. Community New people The people who are participating in online song contests are often people with interest in the Eurovision Song Contest. Most people who are part of the community have discovered the contests on the video website Youtube. Contests are often discovered because of comments posted by the contest hosts on ESC related videos or channels. Communication People participating in the contests are mainly using Youtube and the Song Contest Forums for communicating with each other. When the first few contests started it was most normal to contact each other with private messages, channel comments or video comments on Youtube. When Youtube changed their channel design, communicating through channel comments almost disappeard entirely. With the increased popularity of the Song Contest Forums, communicating through Youtube slightly decreased but Youtube is still frequently used to submit entries to contests and to vote in contests. Hosting Interest Those who are hosting a song contest have in most cases participated in another song contest before they have started their own, but many people also instantly creates a contest when they discover the existence of others. People who are discovering the community for the first time often quickly becomes interested in making their very own contest rather than participating in other people contests. Almost half of the people who are members of the community are hosting or have hosted a contest, or at least a national selection. See also *List of song contests *Song Contest Wiki *Song Contest Forums Category:Miscellaneous